A Lecture on the Sculpture of Indochina, Siam, and Java

Extract

The Director (Sir Kichard Winstedt) introduced this sculptor to a large audience of members of this Society and of the Royal Central Asian Society in the following words: “Those who have seen Dora Gordine's sculpture in London or Paris, at the Tate Gallery or at London University, in Achimoto or Singapore, will know that they are to listen to a real artist. She is not one of those acrobats of art, who tickle a public too amused by novelty to appraise the antics of artists as Dr. Johnson appraised the antics of a dog walking on his hind-legs: ‘it is not well done, but one is surprised to find it done at all.’ Eccentricities in modern art are the now belated relics of revolt from realistic representation. Greek reason, fascinated at discovering itself, came to ignore other faculties of the human spirit, and left the world the doubtful legacy of a specious realism. It substituted for the emotional interpretation of the individual sculptor a cold art of formal rules and ideal types. To-day, too, in spite of the modern reaction against the tyranny of reason even the surrealist thinks too much and sees and feels too little. ‘You are an artist,’ Tchekov wrote to Gorki, ‘you can feel superbly. You are plastic, that is, when you describe a thing, you see and touch it with your hands. That is real art.’ Dora Gordine's mind, like that of every genuine artist, is, in Tchekov's phrase, plastic, so that she is acutely aware of the perfection of modulated planes in Maillol's best work, of the tense vitality beneath the apparent simplicity of an archaic Greek κρη, and of the vibrant rhythm of Hindu masterpieces. Feeling superbly, she can interpret sensations that admit of no equivocation.